Alarm Call

by Jardine, Quintin

  ‘Hi, Marcie,’ I said, gently. ‘I’m Oz.’

  She nodded. ‘I know who you are.’

  ‘That’s your brother John outside,’ I told her, ‘beating the crap out of your boyfriend. I’m afraid he’s wanted in Las Vegas for a fairly nasty rape, involving narcotics. He’s going back there too; there’s extradition between here and Nevada, as I’m sure you’ll know. I’m sorry we’re not meeting under happier circumstances.’

  ‘Me too,’ she replied, sadly. ‘I could guess there was trouble, the way he turned up in the middle of the night.’

  I looked around the room. I could see a kid’s bed but no kid. ‘Where’s Tom?’ I asked.

  She was about to answer, but at that moment, a door on the right swung open and a child ran in from a sunny porch to the side of the main room. But this boy wasn’t a year old: he was big and sturdy and looked to be at least three.

  ‘Hello,’ he greeted me, looking up at me with the uncomplicated innocence of childhood, through blue eyes, set in a fresh face, beneath a mop of dark hair. ‘Who’re you?’

  I looked down at him, and as I did, I experienced what I swear to you was, still is, and always will be, the most unexpected and, somehow, terrifying moment of my life.

  I looked down at him: in that little figure, I saw someone I recognised from photographs taken way back in my past, around thirty-five years back, in fact. In an instant, I knew everything: there was no thought process involved, I just knew everything. I waited until I had mastered my shock, and until my heart rate had returned to something like normal, then I knelt down beside him.

  ‘Tom,’ I answered, trying to keep my voice steady, ‘my name’s Oz. Has your mother ever told you about me, and who I am?’

  He beamed. ‘Sure,’ he replied, in an accent that had much of Marcie’s Midwest twang about it. ‘You’re my dad.’

  Chapter 34

  John called the California Highway Patrol to advise them that he’d apprehended and detained a felon on the run from Las Vegas, and I called Lieutenant Oakley to give her the good news.

  Then I called Dawn; I’d expected her to be in Australia with Miles, but they had arrived back in America that morning. She was stunned when I told her about her nephew; Prim had given her no hint of his existence, and neither, as it turned out, had her parents. Apparently, when I’d dropped Prim at Semple House ten days earlier, she’d said, ‘Hello’, ‘Thanks for lunch’, ‘Lovely to see you, must go now,’ and not much more. They’d been totally puzzled by the visit.

  Dawn told me something else too. On the previous Wednesday, Elanore’s condition had begun to deteriorate more rapidly. ‘The consultant’s told Dad that it’s a matter of weeks now. He’s been trying to get in touch with Prim, but he couldn’t.’

  ‘Tell him that he has now.’

  ‘You know where she is?’

  ‘Yes, and I’ll make sure that she gets in touch with David.’

  ‘Thanks, Oz,’ she said, relief in her voice. ‘You know, you’re the only person who’s ever really been able to control my sister. If only she hadn’t been such a Goddamned idiot, you two might still be together, and that little boy might have had conventional parents, like everyone else.’

  I almost laughed at her. For all her fame Dawn’s retained a gentle view of life; she thinks her world’s conventional, and on top of that, she thought I could control Prim. If she only knew; the truth is that the two of us have never really been fully in control of ourselves.

  By the time the state troopers arrived to take possession of Johnson and his effects, I had found his camera, wiped clean the chip with my candid-camera shots, and erased beyond recovery the entire contents of his computer’s hard drive. I had also found a pen drive on which he’d made a back-up. I got rid of that by a less technical method: I smashed it into tiny pieces under the heel of my Panama Jack sandal. My son watched me, fascinated. Eventually I let him help, which he did enthusiastically. When I judged that the fragments were small enough, I swept them up and tossed them out of the window, after their former owner.

  Marcie had in her possession Tom’s passport, and the substantial majority of fifteen thousand dollars in cash given her by Johnson, from Prim, when he had flown the boy across the Atlantic. She also had his birth certificate: he had been registered in Lewes, Sussex, three years, three months and five days before, by his mother, Primavera Eagle Phillips. The father’s name on the certificate was given as Osbert Blackstone.

  After the police had taken Johnson and his effects away, the four of us, three adults and Tom, stood in the bright, dusty, yet suddenly fresher car park. I had explained the happenings to a slightly alarmed Cameron and had booked rooms one and two for the night, for John and me.

  ‘What do I do now?’ Marcie asked her brother. ‘Nicky may have turned out to be a shit-heel, but he’s all I had.’

  ‘We all have our weaknesses,’ he replied, dismissing him. ‘But, sis, you should have told me about Paul.’

  ‘He wouldn’t have wanted me to,’ she countered, ‘even if he’d been capable of making a decision. And you said you never wanted to hear of him again.’

  ‘You want to know what I think you should do?’ I asked her, then told her, whether she wanted to hear it or not. ‘I think you should take what’s left of that fifteen grand, go back to Minneapolis, and hang out with your mother for a while. She’s a very nice lady, and she deserves better of you.’

  As it turned out, that was exactly what she did want to hear. And so it was agreed. We stayed over in Cameron’s, had a few beers in his pub . . . Its most spectacular attraction was a wall of beer cans. They turned out to be Cameron’s hobby: he’d been collecting them since he was a kid . . . then ate in his restaurant, where I introduced John to bangers and mash, English style, but only after some serious Boston clam chowder. We even had a pot of PG Tips. Tom seemed to know the menu well: he went straight for a burger and fries.

  It turned out that the two buses weren’t there for show.

  One’s for smokers, to give them a place to indulge their habit . . . it’s a no-no in public places in California . . . and the other’s full of video games for the kids. Tom took me in there and showed me a couple.

  Next morning I ... or rather the navigation system ... drove both Wallingers to San Francisco Airport, and dropped them off for a flight eastwards.

  Tom and I, we headed on south, down Interstate 5, bound for Los Angeles . . . Marcie’s old jeep, which she sold to Cameron, who reckoned his brother could use it, had a child seat in it.

  The drive’s pretty scenic and I enjoyed it, but even more I enjoyed my son’s constant chatter from the back. He’d been attached to Aunt Marcie; she’d done a great job of mothering him since he’d been in America, and I understood from what I’d learned the night before, and from what he said to me, that she’d been a fixture in his life for as long as he could remember. He’d been upset when the time had come to part, but I’d promised him he’d see her again one day.

  He asked about his mother . . . Mommy . . . too, of course; he seemed to be used to her going in and out of his life, but still there was adoration in his voice when he spoke about her. I had to tell him that she’d be gone for a little longer, but that most of the time he’d have me around. That seemed to satisfy him.

  I tried to explain to him why I hadn’t been around for him, but he was too young to take any of it in. The important thing was that he was glad I was there now, and bursting with pride that we were off on an adventure together. On the way down, I told him about his aunt Dawn, his uncle Miles and his cousin Bruce. As far as I could tell from his reaction, he’d never heard of any of them, apart from Miles . . . Aunt Marcie had shown him a picture in a magazine, and had told him that he was very famous, more famous than me, or even Bugs Bunny. I came to understand that Bugs is Tom’s benchmark for fame.

  With cruise control engaged, and the navigation system silent for three hours, I made good time, and reached Beverly Hills in the early afternoon. Dawn was
expecting us, but Miles had been forced to go to his office for a meeting with the casting director on his next project.

  Bruce was there, though. It was interesting to watch the cousins meet for the first time, sizing each other up like a pair of young cats, before deciding to get on. It made me realise that Tom had no experience of interaction with other children; that was going to change before he was much older.

  We had lunch under an awning on the Grayson sun-deck watching the boys as they splashed in the pool. I made Tom wear armbands, but soon I could see that he didn’t need them. He’s like a fish; so was I at his age.

  I told Dawn the whole story, from start to finish; some I’d had from Primavera, and I’d filled in a few blanks for myself. Prim’s nursing job in England, after our split, and after the confrontation in Edinburgh with her and Johnson had backfired on her, had been a sham. She’d lived in Sussex for a while, getting her affairs in order, carrying Tom, and then giving birth to him, alone all the time, with nothing to do but plot my humiliation and downfall.

  When the baby was almost a year old, she’d taken him to Los Angeles, to meet up with Nicky Johnson. That was when she’d met Marcie Wallinger, and her brother: that was when the photograph of Tom and Paul together had been taken. Originally she’d planned to recruit Paul, to hire him like an actor, to play the part, but out of the blue, he’d had his stroke, during the run of a play in which Nicky was also appearing. So Prim had made a mid-course correction: instead of using him, they’d stolen his identity, knowing that he would be in Santa Fe for the rest of his inevitably short life.

  ‘It was like a legend in a spy novel,’ I explained. ‘Prim planned everything, then Johnson helped her make it happen, so that when the time came it would look real, and wouldn’t be questioned. They went through the ritual of the meeting at Gleneagles, so they’d be remembered. While they were doing that, Marcie looked after Tom. He’s spent half his life with her, you know. She’s a good woman; she didn’t deserve Nicky.’

  ‘Maybe we can find a way of looking after her,’ Dawn mused. ‘But about Tom?’ she asked. ‘If he was supposed to be Prim’s child with Wallinger, then he’d only have been a year old now. So how did they . . .’

  ‘Easy. She registered a birth that never happened; she said it was a home confinement, to get round the hospital problem. Then Nicky, who had Wallinger’s passport by this time . . . they looked alike, so with a moustache and some makeup it wasn’t difficult to get one . . . added Tom’s name to it in London, using the fake birth certificate.’

  ‘But isn’t all that illegal?’

  I laughed. ‘Too bloody right it is. As well as his date-rape charge in Vegas, Nicky’s committed a couple of federal offences as well. The boy’s cooked, I’ll tell you, completely bloody cooked. As for Prim, that’s where it all really got out of control for her. False registration’s a crime in itself, but when she did feed me the bait and get me involved, I brought in a lawyer, and that made it worse. He got her a court order requiring Tom’s return to Britain. It was based on a false statement and a fake birth certificate. At the very least that’s contempt of court, maybe even perjury, and perverting the course of justice.’

  ‘So she’s in big trouble back home?’

  ‘I’m afraid so. My future brother-in-law’s been acting for her, so he’s been embarrassed. I told him about it last night. He’s going to have to petition to withdraw the interdict, but more than that. He’s an officer of the court, so he’s going to have to report everything that happened. When . . . I don’t think it’s an if . . . she’s prosecuted, he won’t even be able to appear for the defence, as he’ll be a Crown witness. So, if it comes to it, will I.’

  ‘Can’t you do something?’

  I couldn’t keep the frown off my face. ‘Pull some strings, you mean? Keep her out of court? Have you any idea what your sister tried to do to me, Dawn? She tried to end my marriage, she tried to ruin my career, and she tried to extort five million quid out of me. Why? Because she wanted to get back at me, and at Susie, for the way our marriage ended.’

  ‘More than that, I think,’ said Dawn, softly. ‘Not just get back at you; she wanted to get you back.’

  ‘By ruining me?’

  ‘Yes. It’s happened before, remember. You left her before, for Jan, and when she died, you came back to her. The whole thing hasn’t just been about revenge. She’ll have calculated that when you came crawling out of the rubble of your life, you’d come crawling back to her. I’m sure of it, Oz.’

  ‘Why would she do that?’

  ‘Because she loves you, like Juliet loved Romeo, Darby did Joan, Ronnie did Nancy. She loves you like crazy ... maybe literally so, I don’t know.’

  ‘She loves me so much she hid my son from me?’

  ‘Maybe she thought he’d be the final lure to bring you back. Or maybe she knew that when she started you on the false trail she’d mapped out you’d wind up finding him.’ Her mouth seemed to tighten for a second. ‘The sad thing for me is that she’d use a little boy like that. Does she feel anything for him, anything at all?’

  I thought about that, and about the way Prim had been the night before. ‘She does, I’m pretty sure. Look at him, he’s as healthy and happy a wee chap as you’ve ever seen.’

  ‘Are you going to take him from her?’ she asked.

  ‘I’m going to apply for legal custody. I’ve told my solicitor to get on to that straight away; the process will be under way by now. But I can’t cut his mother out of his life, can I? She might wind up in jail in Scotland for a while, but when she comes out, of course she’ll have access.’

  ‘Miles and I will supervise that if you like . . . to make sure she doesn’t disappear with him again.’

  I appreciated her offer and I told her so. ‘That’s long-term, though. There’s something I’d like you to do before that.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘When all this started, I gave my word on something to Prim, but really it was to your mother, and I’d like you to help me keep it. I promised that Elanore will see her grandson before she dies. I’d like you to take him there.’

  Chapter 35

  It took me a little while to explain to Tom that I was going to have to leave him again. But I promised that he’d have a great time with his auntie Dawn, his uncle Miles, and Bruce, and that there would be other people for him to meet as well, not least his grandpa, a great big man who’d tell him funny stories about pulling teeth.

  When he was ready to let me go, I promised that I’d see him soon in Scotland, kissed him farewell, not goodbye, and drove back to Vegas, almost picking up a speeding ticket on the way, courtesy of the Californian Highway Patrol. (The officer settled for an autograph and a handshake.)

  It was getting dark when I reached the Bellagio. I arranged the return of the car to Hertz, with a mental note to put a Jag in the garage of the house in Beverly Hills when we bought it. (My non-stop tour of North America had changed me: I’d decided that the next time the accountants recommended we go offshore, I was going to agree with them.)

  I took the lift up to my suite, walked into my room and dumped my bag on the floor. There was someone in my bed: her red hair was all over the pillow, like it always is, and she was sound asleep. There had been no skin and feathers in the living area, so I guessed that when Liam had picked her up from McCarron, as I’d asked him to do, he’d made damn sure she didn’t get anywhere near Prim.

  She was still in the Gradis’ suite when I went along there ... I was pleased to see that the Behemoth’s spots were fading, finally; maybe he was going to make next week. I told her nothing, only that she was moving out, to a suite in the Mandalay Bay, at the end of the Strip, then waited as she packed and took her along there. She was tense all the way; once or twice she started, as if she was going to ask me something, but I told her to shut up, that I would talk to her when I was good and ready.

  Once she was checked in, I took her to the China Grill. She looked as if she hadn’t been eating properly
since I left, and I was getting peckish again.

  I told her what had happened over a couple of Shanghai lobsters. She wept a bit when I told her Tom was safe and with his astonished aunt Dawn, a little more when I savaged her for keeping his existence from me, and a lot more when I told her that she probably wouldn’t see him again for quite a while.

  It might have been a bit embarrassing for the waiters but, frankly, by that time I didn’t give a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut.

  When I had softened a little, I told her about her mother; I expected her to cry about that too, but she didn’t. It seemed as if her tears were reserved for Tom. She was upset, don’t get me wrong, but what I was telling her wasn’t news. She was a nurse by profession, after all, and she’d known what was coming.

  Finally I told her that I wanted her to make me some promises.

  ‘One, you don’t fight me over Tom’s custody. You’ll find it difficult from a jail cell, but if you do I’ll win, and it’ll be harder for you in the long run. Go along with it, and he’ll spend as much time with you as he does with me.

  ‘Two, you phone your father tomorrow, and this time you really do tell him the truth, so that he can prepare Elanore before Dawn turns up on the doorstep with our son.

  ‘Three, as long as you’re in Vegas ... you’re paying for this lot, by the way, now I know you’re not really skint, so how long that is, is up to you . . . you don’t come anywhere near Susie and me, especially Susie. You go near her, and she’ll tear your head off.

  ‘Four, tomorrow morning, first thing, you will phone Harvey January and apologise to him, until the profuseness is leaking from your ears.